Salon

The history of Leonid Tsypkin's "Summer in Baden-Baden" (Leto v Badene), re-released this year by NLO, is one of the oddest adventures in recent Russian literature. Like Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Bulgakov, Tsypkin belonged to the venerable tradition of doctors with a passion for writing. He worked at a Moscow medical institute and wrote mostly for himself. After his son left for the United States, Tsypkin was demoted and ostracized, and died a week after the first installment of his novel was published in a New York emigre newspaper in the early 1980s.

Years later, the late cultural icon Susan Sontag stumbled upon a translation of the book in a secondhand bookstore. Heralding the author as an overlooked genius, she claimed that "one emerges from reading 'Summer in Baden-Baden' purged, shaken, fortified, breathing a little deeper, grateful to literature for what it can harbor and exemplify." After her piece in The New Yorker, the novel became a hit and was soon published in Russia.

The novel focuses on Fyodor Dostoevsky. Written in stream-of-consciousness style, it interweaves the story of Dostoevsky's honeymoon trip to the German resort of Baden-Baden with the train ride of the narrator, evidently Tsypkin himself, from Moscow to Leningrad. One of the its central themes is Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism. The narrator, a Jew, tries to reconcile this fact with his love for the great writer. He analyzes Dostoevsky with medical meticulousness (Tsypkin specialized in pathology) and paints an unflattering portrait of a nervous, deranged man, nagged by his wife, obsessed with gambling and craving the attention of the rich and powerful. Still, the novel leaves no doubt that Dostoevsky's genius prevails over all his personal limitations.

Following Sontag's cue, most Western critics applauded "Summer in Baden-Baden." In Russia, however, reviews were mixed at best. Some critics accused Tsypkin of harboring anti-Russian sentiments, others of dilettantism; still others said that his stream-of-consciousness technique was obsolete and the author was reinventing the wheel. Many of them expressed a patronizing attitude toward Sontag, which can be boiled down to two basic thoughts: "What can an American academic know about Russian masterpieces?" and "If it were a masterpiece, we would have said so first."

The new edition from NLO, complete with several previously unpublished short stories and a foreword by the author's son, will give Russian readers a chance to judge for themselves.